Then there is the dreaded "Press F6 to install RAID drivers" process when a floppy drive-less computer is having its Windows operating system installed... Wouldn't it be so nice if those RAID drivers were already integrated onto a customized Windows install CD?

And that's actually how the idea for this guide came about. We needed to find a way to include the necessary disk controller drivers in with the Windows operating system CD so that we could actually install the OS on a computer using RAID, but lacking a floppy drive. Since we were doing that, we figured we might as well add the rest of the necessary drivers in as well. And since we're on a roll now, why not figure out how to install drivers from scratch and perform a fully unattended installation of Windows XP as well?  We're going to take that concept one step further, and examine how to introduce SATA and RAID drivers, and a few other things options and drivers, into a customized unattended install Windows 2000 or XP boot CD.

The goal is to help you create a bootable WinXP/2K install CD which not only contains the latest version of your operating system, but also has any SATA/RAID drivers needed to install Windows and all the necessary drivers Windows will need for your hardware. Not only that, once you start the installation process it will install all of this automatically in on go, without any input from the user. Grab a coffee, and let's get started!